by Roy Jenkins
The third son, John Neilson Gladstone, just short of three years older than William, was also entered for Eton. But he was resolved to go into the navy, although it was a bad time to do so – in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars when the south coastal counties were spattered with small Regency gentleman’s residences from which redundant naval officers looked out in vain for ships to command. His determination however was great and he went to the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth in 1820. His career at sea was over at the age of twenty-eight, but although he could not thereafter get a ship he got some promotion and ended as a captain RN. He lived the second half of his life as a Wiltshire country gentleman, settling at Bowden Park, near Chippenham, preceding Lord Weinstock by a century and a quarter in the acquisition of that estate. He was also intermittently an MP, never tempted by his brother’s transition to fluctuate from his Tory faith. Although he appeared to have the most robust health and least neurotic temperament of all the Gladstone children, he died the first of the brothers, in 1863.
On the day in September 1821 when William Gladstone for the first time accompanied his brother Tom to Eton, there was no reason for him to feel exhilarated. He had hitherto had only slight schooling experience. He had been taught, but not very much or very skilfully, by the Evangelical vicar of St Thomas’s, Seaforth, the church which his father had built and entered in his balance sheet. The Revd Mr Rawson was imported from Cambridge by John Gladstone and ran a school for about twelve boys in the parsonage.
This instruction singularly failed to excite him: ‘To return to Mr Rawson,’ he wrote at the 1892 beginning of his unfinished autobiography. ‘Everything was unobjectionable there. I suppose I learnt something there. But I have no recollection of being under any moral or personal influence whatever. . . .’4 But if he thought little of Rawson he thought still less of himself as a child. He had a strong conviction, in retrospect at any rate, that he was neither a good nor an engaging child. ‘The best I can say for it is that I do not think it was actually a vicious childhood,’ he continued in 1892. ‘. . . But truth obliges me to record this against myself. I have no recollection of being a loving or a winning child.’5 The confluence of his lack of response to Rawson and lack of esteem for himself no doubt accounted for the remarkable absence of any nostalgia for childhood when he paid a return visit to Seaforth Rectory and indeed to the Rawsons thirty-two years later.2
In these circumstances it was lucky that such a wide new window opened to him when he went to Eton in 1821. The journey to South Buckinghamshire was a formidable one for an eleven-year-old boy, although he already had a remarkably wide geographical experience for a child of that age in the pre-railway years; he had travelled to London, Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh and Dingwall. His 1821 journey (to deduce backwards from his diaries, which he began just under four years later) involved departure from Seaforth in the early afternoon, leaving Liverpool by the Birmingham coach at 3.30 p.m. and getting to that Midland town at about 5.30 the next morning, making an interchange and proceeding onwards by a coach sometimes called the ‘Hibernian’, which presumably came from Holyhead, and allowed its passengers to breakfast at Leamington and dine at Benson (between Oxford and Henley) before depositing them at Slough in time to get to Eton at 7.00 p.m.6 Tom’s presence may have given some reassurance, particularly as William was to be in the same house and also to do his fagging under him. But it must also have been something of a wet blanket, for Tom can hardly have fired him with Eton enthusiasm.
However, William took to Eton like the proverbial duck to water. Despite his later tendency self-consciously to defer to rank, there is no suggestion that he ever felt or suffered from any sense of inferiority because of his northern trading origin. Magnus thought that he was ‘never a popular boy’ because of his lack of interest in games, but this is implausible. Gladstone was at school well before the mania for the football field and the cricket pitch spread from Thomas Arnold’s Rugby into the new ‘imperial’ public schools and reached its apogee in Henry Newbolt’s end-of-the-century Clifton-inspired ‘bumping pitch and a blinding light’. Regency England, which was only a year over when Gladstone got to Eton, thought more of gaming than of games. He was also there before that new wave of schools imposed on their pupils the standard accent of the southern upper middle classes.
The old schools never did this. Addington, Winchester’s one Prime Minister, nicknamed ‘the Doctor’, spoke like the mixture of Reading apothecary and Hampshire yeoman which was his provenance. Peel, who went to Harrow from a rich but parvenu northern background very similar to that from which Gladstone came twenty years later, always spoke with a distinct Lancashire accent. And Curzon, who was a notable Etonian half a century after Gladstone, was famous for his short Derbyshire as, as in bräss and gläss (when complaining that the Foreign Secretary’s inkstand was that rather than silver and crystal).
In Gladstone’s case, as opposed to Addington’s or Peel’s, there are faint and scratchy wax cylinder recordings which give some indication of the authority, but not of the depth or melodiousness, of his voice late in life. The accent is faintly northern. Seventy years earlier Gladstone must, if anything, have spoken with more and not less of a Liverpool accent, but this was neither unusual nor inhibiting to him at Eton. He was an early and central member of the Eton Society (Pop as it later came to be called, or the Literati, giving it a rather different connotation, as it was known at the time) and at its meetings first showed his unusual command over an oratory which was classical in structure and illustration, yet infused with a fervour and expounded with a profligacy of words which made it hardly Roman. The stylized nature of the framework, even if not always of the contents, of the debates was accentuated by the strange convention, an exaggerated inversion of the ‘fourteen-day rule’ in the early years of political television, that no issue which had arisen in the past fifty years could be debated. It at least gave the participants a need for historical knowledge and a taste for argument by analogy.
Gladstone’s mind meshed well with Eton teaching. He later claimed that ‘we knew very little indeed, but we knew it accurately’.7 This was perhaps true so far as the limited and severely classical curriculum was concerned. Gladstone liked conventional learning, and was good if not brilliant at Latin and Greek composition. He had great application and muscular intellectual strength. But he had no special verbal facility in English, and probably not in the dead languages either. For an outstanding orator, which he was already on the way to becoming, he was singularly lacking in neatness of phrase. He was too periphrastic and too addicted to qualifying subordinate clauses. His force depended essentially on his flashing eyes and the physical authority of his presence. Thus the printed records of his speeches do not compare with those of Chatham or Burke or Canning or Abraham Lincoln, or even with the contrived epigrams of Disraeli, whose flippancy was so antipathetic to Gladstone. There was also a degree of sentimentality about Gladstone’s later speeches, ‘intellectual sentimentality’ Morley called it with a well-chosen oxymoron, which was absent from the oratory of the other five just cited. Even in the sentimental category, however, John Bright made finer arches out of hackneyed but emotive images. Gladstone’s oratory was a most powerful vehicle for moving men’s minds on a particular issue rather than an art form which stood on its own because of the limpidity of the construction.
Nonetheless Gladstone did a good deal better at Eton than Lincoln or Bright would have been likely to do. Unlike Tom he attracted the interest of and got on well with the best masters. Although occasionally beaten by Keate, he appears to have both liked and respected him. Certainly he persuaded himself that this was so and wrote in his last years of Keate’s enthusiastic reception at an 1841 banquet to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the school as ‘one of the most moving spectacles that in my whole life I have witnessed’.8 But it was E. C. Hawtrey, Keate’s successor as headmaster from 1834, later Provost and the maker of Victorian Eton, from whom Gladstone claimed that, about Easter 1822, he fi
rst received a spark – divinae particulam aurae – which opened his mind and set him on a determined course of acquiring knowledge.9
Hawtrey was a great schoolmaster, but he was unlikely to have been as necessary an agent as Gladstone retrospectively suggested. Gladstone had phenomenal energy, both mental and physical, a blotting-paper mind, and an imbued sense that the highest challenge of life was to satisfy God of the most effective possible use of time. William Gladstone respected the minutes as much as John Gladstone respected money. Just as the father meticulously kept count of how he spent his pounds so the son equally meticulously kept count of how he spent his quarter hours. His diary, which he began in July 1825 at the age of fifteen and continued until he was eighty-five, with an entry for each day of nearly seventy years, was as unique and impressive a document in the round as it was often bleakly factual in its individual entries. It mostly eschewed comment, for its essential quality, as Gladstone expressed it when trying to persuade his youngest son to follow his example, was as ‘an account-book of the all-precious gift of Time’.
Gladstone’s combination of energy, eclectic interest and feeling of intellectual accountability to God made him develop at Eton into a voracious reader. Throughout the whole seven decades of the diary he kept a comprehensive (although sometimes cryptic)3 record of what he read, whether books or pamphlets, everything indeed except for newspapers, which he also devoured although without individual record. As a result it is possible in a way that cumulatively is almost without parallel to see the whole vast sweep of his literary input: theology, politics, history, science, poetry, fiction, all the main controversial publications of the year, but also many chance works of information which just happened to catch his interest made up the almost unbelievable total of nearly 20,000 works which he recorded as having consumed in the course of his life. He started early. Thus on 28 February 1826, when he was just sixteen, he ‘Read Memoirs of Sir Rt Walpole in Biograph. Dict; finished L’Avare: read a speech of Huskisson’s on Silk Trade. Capital. Began Lyrics (Greek iambics, instead of usual) and read about 160 lines of the second Georgic. . . .’10
Gladstone’s command over Greek as well as Latin was already considerable, and remained with him throughout his life. He read the Bible every day and often in a Greek text. Homer was a constant companion, and indeed his Homeric studies were a long-term intellectual hobby, into which he would retreat, sometimes at inappropriate moments, and led to his producing some fantastical and unscholarly theories about the roots of Christianity. French he was working at hard with Monsieur Berthomier, a sort of supernumerary Eton master. German was still beyond him, but he later acquired enough to be able in middle life to hold theological discussions with Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich. Italian he taught himself more thoroughly, and Dante (although not until 1834) ranked with Homer as his most sustaining literary refuge. His attitude to modern languages was reminiscent of a tank cutting its way through undergrowth. It was not subtle. His letters, even in French, whether to station masters or statesmen, lacked much sense of elegance, or idiom, or the subjunctive (which had he been French would have been made for him), but he could say what he wanted to.
His concepts of a common civilization and of a united Christendom, which were strong, convinced him that an educated Englishman (which his Anglicanism and his Thames Valley school and university inevitably made him even though his blood made him the most Scottish of all Prime Ministers, with the possible exception of Ramsay MacDonald) ought to be able to communicate in all the principal languages of civilized Europe. So he did so. He conversed with Döllinger in German. He corresponded with Guizot in French notwithstanding that the latter’s command of English was such that he had translated all thirteen volumes of Gibbon. And when he was briefly (and eccentrically) Commissioner for the Ionian Isles he made a major policy speech to the Corfu National Assembly in Italian. (It is possible on this occasion that speaker and audience were united in an equal imperfection in their grasp of the language which he had decided should be the bridge between them.) His ability, from his first Italian visit in 1832 to his last in 1889, to listen to vernacular sermons from Milan to Naples and appraise their theological worth was more impressive. In any event he despised allowing languages to be a barrier in the Concert of Europe, a concept which for him had a lively and consistent meaning.
Gladstone’s six and a quarter years at Eton were also rewarding on the plane of personal friendship. With the exception of the Earl of Lincoln, later Duke of Newcastle, who was to perform a crucial role in the advancement of Gladstone’s early career, he made no grandee friends. But there were plenty of figures of Eton and subsequent note. There was Francis Doyle, who became a fellow of All Souls in 1839, succeeded to a baronetcy, was best man at Gladstone’s wedding, and after thirty years as a Customs official became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1877. There was James Milnes Gaskell, whose Unitarian mother first opened Gladstone’s mind to the possibility that all true Christians, whatever their liturgical faults, might look forward to salvation rather than to eternal damnation. There was George Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand at thirty-two and then of Lichfield at a more normal episcopal age, in whose memory Selwyn College, Cambridge, was founded. There was Gerald Wellesley, only nepotically ducal, who was to be Dean of Windsor for nearly thirty years, the strongest Anglican influence upon Queen Victoria (although that was not saying a great deal) in the plenitude of her widowhood, and the man with whom Gladstone most liked to discuss the ever fascinating subject of ecclesiastical patronage during his first premiership.
Above all there was Arthur Hallam, the jeune homme fatal (in several senses of the last word) of his age, the Rupert Brooke of the early nineteenth century. He lived only twenty-two years, but achieved an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, which was richly deserved by anyone who could captivate Gladstone and then inspire Tennyson to write In Memoriam. Arthur Hallam, the son of a constitutional historian, was two years younger than Gladstone – a big gap in their late teens – and thought dazzlingly beautiful. Gladstone was also very handsome as a young man. There is no evidence of any homosexual behaviour, but it is impossible to believe that there was not the electricity of infatuation and jealousy between them. Hallam was a Foxite Whig, and he appears to have been the one person at Eton, not Lincoln, or Wellesley, who gave Gladstone some sense of inferiority of background. ‘He had evidently, from the first,’ Gladstone wrote, ‘a large share of cultivated domestic education: with a father absorbed in diversified business, I had little or none’.11 Hallam leaves the impression of being not only a Whig but also a minx. In 1826 he wrote to his sister that he was ‘walking out a good deal, and running the changes on Rogers, Gladstone, Farr and Hanmer’. This was after Gladstone had managed to arrange that, although they were in different and widely separated houses, they could breakfast for alternating weeks in each other’s rooms. Gladstone went to Oxford in 1828 and Hallam, after more than a year in Italy, to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Tennyson, in 1829. But already before they separately left Eton their relationship was over its crest. Gladstone, late in 1829, wrote an account of it which combines the flavour of a shop-girl’s romance with that of the prickly and etiolated jealousies of Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey in the Cambridge of seventy years later:
The history of my connection with [Hallam] is as follows.
It began late in 1824, more at his seeking than mine.
It slackened soon: more on my account than his.
It recommenced in 1825, late, more at my seeking than his.
It ripened much from the early part of 1826 to the middle.
In the middle [Farr?] rather took my place.
In the latter end [of 1826] it became closer & stronger than ever.
Through 1827 it flourished most happily, to my very great enjoyment. . . .
Middle of 1828 [Hallam] returned and thought me cold. (I did not increase my rate of letters as under the circumstances I ought to have done.). . . .
At presen
t, almost an uncertainty, very painful, whether I may call [Hallam] my friend or not.12
Prickly and defensive this may have been, but it was a good deal better than the pompous and dismissive letter which Hallam wrote to Gladstone nine months later:
My dear Gladstone,
I read the latter part of your letter with much sorrow. . . . I am utterly unworthy of the admiring sentiments you express. . . . Circumstance, my dear Gladstone, has separated our paths, but it can never do away with what has been. The stamp of each of our minds is upon the other. . . . I am aware that your letter points to something more. . . . If you mean that such intercourse as we had at Eton is not likely again to fall to our lot, that is undoubtedly, a stern truth. But if you intimate that I have ceased, or may cease, to interest myself in your happiness, indeed, Gladstone, you are mistaken.13
Three years after writing this tiresome missive Hallam died of apoplexy in a Vienna hotel. Gladstone heard the news (a month late) during the first of his autumn visits to his father at Fasque and ‘walked upon the hills to muse upon this very mournful event, which cuts me to the heart’. Nonetheless he intermingled reality with nostalgia and wrote on that same day of Hallam as ‘my earliest near friend’, and of his ‘attaining almost to that ideal standard, of which it is presumption to expect an example in natural life’.14 Tennyson felt less need for qualification and wrote of:
